gazapkhuli

Spring has come to Georgia. The hillsides are painted in the Easter pastels of cherry and plum blossoms, and the nights are finally warm enough for me to sleep with just one sleeping bag, rather than two. As proof of nature's prolificacy, my host family's cow gave birth to a calf this morning. Wow, I have to say, live birth is pretty... gory. As the calf was fighting through the slime of its placenta and trying to stand up on its little yellow and purple proto-hooves, I couldn't help but think that mammals would be better off laying eggs. I think the platypus got it right (being semi-aquatic is also really cool). But the birth was exciting to watch if not only because it means that the cow will be giving milk again, and I can return to my dairy-heavy diet of khatchapuri and warm milk twice a day. I'll put on a few kilos for summer.
The incessant rain stopped being so incessant this weekend, and I have been enjoying the sunshine. I was just relaxing the Batumi park here by the internet cafe: soaking up the solar warmth, getting my necessary dose of vitamin D, watching the children and the pigeons run after each other. They fixed up the park last fall by cutting the weeds, installing benches, and restoring the statue of a woman aviator who I always thought was Amelia Earhart, but turns out to be the first female, Soviet fighter pilot, a woman from Batumi. A good city is really made by its parks, so it was a step in the right direction for ole' Batum. There is also a new, huge (and free!) Ferris wheel by the beach that I took a ride on with John a few weeks ago, before he left.
In other news... I got my hair cut in Rustavi by and old man at in a corner barbershop. After trying to convince me that I should really be Georgian Orthodox, not Catholic, so that I can marry a Georgian girl, and telling me that I was like some famous Georgian movie character who returns after years in the wilderness with log hair and a beard, and with a portrait of Stalin watching over us, the old man (who could have used a shave and a haircut himself) chopped off my locks with a pair of dull scissors. I will never complain about a haircut in America again. I told John that it was a symbolic act, a reversal of the Georgian tradition of not cutting one's hair during a period of mourning, the mourning in this case being for the loss of the fabled leader of the shadow administration of the rebel Volunteers of the formerly-autonomous Peace Corps Adjara, John.
I've also been having to contemplate my obsolescence as Ambassador of American Culture to my village since my host-family got satellite TV and my students have been receiving insightful letters and pop-culture magazines from their pen-pals in the USA. In Turkey, the satellite dishes hang on the corners of every building like some strange fungus, and Georgia is starting to look the same. The other week, I had the strange experience of drying my (now gone) hair by the wood stove while watching my host-father flip though Teen Vogue, wearing his gigantic reading glasses, while my host-uncle looked at Teen People, and the new Snoop Dog video played on MTV France in the background. What do they need me for now?